dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle’s blog

RG29 - 720 words

Do you miss The Rickies? Those self-styled paraders captivated Eugene Celebration audiences for a decade, until winning awards for humor, design and originality became routine. Routine is humor’s natural predator, so The Rickies slid into the safety of legend and lore, fondly remembered each September. They never revealed their true identities and claimed their motto was “Helping People Be Other People.”

But what if The Rickies added to their zaniness some other accoutrements? What if they built and sat upon human-powered sculptures that raced on streets and water, over sand and through mud? That would be a Kinetic Challenge. They would be in Corvallis.

I consider the Kinetic Challenge to be The Most Eugene Thing Not In Eugene. It’s part of this weekend’s annual daVinci Days Festival in Corvallis. It’s not to be missed.

I attended my first Kinetic Challenge in 1996. Start with a Tournament of Roses Parade-style float. Atop a ten-foot-tall fish, riding it like a cowboy, was a sculpture of a small man with a fishing pole. When I approached, I saw the iridescent scales of the fish were actually CDs. Clever. Then I got closer. They were those ubiquitous free AOL CDs that we were bombarded with back then. Brilliant.

I stood there agape, thinking two thoughts. Somewhere there was a grocery check-out lane that was at least temporarily AOL-promotion-free. And here in front of me was evidence of grown-ups with too much time on their hands.

Since then I have barely missed a Kinetic Challenge in Corvallis. I’ve attended similar races in Port Townsend, Washington; Klamath Falls; and Eureka, California. In Eureka, I met Hobart Brown, the man who started it all as a parade through nearby Ferndale on Mother’s Day in 1969. Brown is a competitor, a sculptor and a showman. He wondered what could be done with human power and ingenuity. Now Kinetic Sculptures are raced in half a dozen west coast towns, plus Denver, Baltimore, Australia, and Elsewhere. YouTube offers 152 choices under “Kinetic Sculpture Race.”

Software engineer Rahn Young brought the concept (or, as the Kineticists would prefer, “koncept”) to Corvallis in 1993. This weekend marks its krystal anniversary in Korvallis, featuring two dozen teams, more or less. Racers and judges will converge on Corvallis, coming from as far away as Ventura, California and the Canadian border.

The teams compete on many levels. Speed is only one consideration. Pageantry is equally important. Each team must perform an original song on Friday evening, introducing themselves and their sculptures to the audience. The racing portion begins on Saturday, after a noon parade. Each sculpture on Sunday must traverse 100 yards through a mud bog, half a mile down the Willamette River, then five more miles through the streets of Corvallis, always carrying a Teddy bear, just in case.

The prizes are minimal. Racers insist they do it “for the glory,” which is a shrewd way of saying they do it for no good reason. This is an Entirely Evitable Event.

But can’t the same be said about most of life? Doing something silly, just for the sake of it — isn’t that supremely human? Is falling in love any different? Enjoying a sunset?

In the past twelve years, I have seen human-sized hamster balls, demotorized lawn mowers, gyroscopic irrigation wheels, retrofitted playground equipment; surfboards, skateboards, and sailboats. Two years ago there was a stainless steel ant that attempted to march the race.

Corvallis boasts the highest percentage of PhDs of any town its size in America. But unlike in Eugene, their smart people build more than arguments and resumes. They make stuff.

Last year, the first-ever Eugene team ran away with an armful of prizes. Benjamin and LeAndera Mattson-Bell and their teenage children won prizes for art, engineering, and pageantry. They return this year as “Rat-Tattoo-Ee.”

Behind the scenes, one of the key organizers for the Kinetic Challenge is Eugene resident Jenette Kane. She’s been involved with Kinetics since 1978 in her home town of Eureka, and in Corvallis since moving to the Willamette Valley in 1998. She’s Lane Community College’s Customized Employee Training Manager, but don’t expect any of the racers to know that. They know her only as Goddess Jen-O — tunic, tiara and all.

How very Rickie-like.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) has been the emcee and color commentator for the Kinetic Challenge in Corvallis for the past eight years. Like everyone else in Eugene, he doesn’t get up to Corvallis often enough. He never was a Rickie, but he appreciates the confusion. He blogs.

RG28 - 700 words

We talk plenty about celebrating diversity. Too much maybe. Talking is no substitute for doing. But this weekend can be different. With a little planning, you can practice what we preach and then regale others with everything you saw and heard in the span of a single day.

I hereby declare each second Sunday in July “Doing Diversity Day” and offer this step-by-step guide to celebrating it.

Dress comfortably, and for the weather. You’ll be walking more than you may be used to, but you won’t ever have to hurry. You’ll be outside during the heat of the day and again as the shadows lengthen in the early evening. Sensible shoes and a light jacket are recommended.

If you start most Sundays with a worship service, try to get to an early one. The cultural brunch afterwards will be all-you-can-eat, so starting with some stillness is never a bad idea. If you’re more into natural wonder and you feel feisty, hike Mt. Pisgah or Spencer’s Butte to start the day.

Arrive at the Safeway on 18th Avenue before 10 AM. Stand in line for tickets to the Oregon Country Fair. Notice the people in front and behind you. They may have nothing in common, except their connection to you for the moment. Ponder that.

Lane Transit District runs free shuttles from their downtown station to the Fair every few minutes. Resist the temptation to drive to Veneta. Diversity is experienced best in close quarters. Notice strangers chatting during the 20-minute bus ride.

The bus will spill you out onto the grounds of the Fair. Don’t worry about feeling lost. Many of the hard-core “Fair Family” will have slept very little since Friday and they’ll seem a little lost themselves. You’ll fit right in.

Drink in the ambiance, sipping from a firehose of people-watching. Eat something. You can find tofu prepared a dozen different ways, but there are also burgers and pizza and elephant ears. Pick a knoll and watch a concert. Watch the people watching. You may wish you could stay longer, but this field trip has two more stops before dinner.

Take the free shuttle back to Eugene. This ride may sound about the same, but smell a little different. The Fair can sometimes stick to you. Make sure you have allowed enough time to arrive downtown well before 3 PM. Walk six blocks north from the LTD station to the Hult Center, for the finale of this year’s Oregon Bach Festival, the “St. Matthew Passion” performed in Silva Hall.

Even if you aren’t lucky enough to get tickets, it’s worth your effort to mill about the lobby with ticket-holders and notice that you don’t look out of place. Dress codes barely exist in Eugene. Shake a little of the Oregon Country Fair dust from your shoes onto the Hult Center carpeting. You’re doing a good thing.

Next stop: Civic Stadium, a few blocks south of the Safeway where you began. Sunday’s baseball game against the Boise Hawks starts at 4:05 and the Eugene Emeralds will be giving away San Diego Padres swag to the first 1000 fans. So you’ll have to choose whether to leave the Hult Center early or arrive at the Ems game late. In any case, you should be there in time for the seventh inning stretch.

Eat a hot dog; have a beer. Or if you prefer, find a cuisine that suits you better, but cheer for the home team with people who eat or clap or cheer differently from you. As choral directors at the Bach Festival often remind us, harmonies require people singing different notes, but all at the same time.

The baseball game will finish well before dark, leaving plenty of time to contemplate everything you saw in a single day — a cornucopia of people and pastimes. Do-it-yourself diversity.

Where else can you do so much so closely so easily? You may even have time to share some of the stories you’ve collected with others. They may want to try it themselves next year, when we will again celebrate “Doing Diversity Day.”

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) has actually done all these things in a single day, more than once. He lives in south Eugene with his large dog. He blogs right here and welcomes comments from readers.

RG27 - Olympic Dreaming (730 words)

The past week has taught us an important secret to success. Aim higher, dream bigger, accept no limits. If you’re not convinced, ask an Olympian. If you’re reading this in a public place, chances are there’s an Olympian near you right now.

A world-class athlete will tell you they constantly fine-tune in their training, but there are also times when they undo everything and start over.

Reinvent your routine in just the right way and your training may suddenly advance more rapidly. A breakthrough may be looming, but only if you summon the courage and the humility to consider whether what you already know is wrong.

Dick Fosbury’s track coach at Medford High School told him to just “play around” with different ways to get over the high jump bar, and the “Fosbury Flop” was born. Fosbury perfected his technique while studying engineering at what is now Oregon State University, broke the world record in the high jump, and brought home to Oregon a gold medal from the 1968 Summer Olympics. Each champion high jumper since has used the Fosbury Flop, crossing the bar face-up instead of face-down.

Athletes testify that things can change all at once. Everything comes together — the parts form a whole in a brand new way. Physicists call it a quantum shift. Biologists call it emergence. Cosmologists call it critical mass. Demographers call it the tipping point. Ethicists call it conversion. Parents call it a growth spurt.

In the early 1900s, civilization was fascinated with slow, steady improvement exemplified by machinery. By the middle of the last century, “new and improved” was redundant and self-evident. We believed everything was slowly getting better. Evolving.

Evolution may be good biology. But it’s profoundly misunderstood in popular culture. Evolutionists long ago abandoned incrementalism for what they call (no kidding) punk-EEK. “Punctuated equilibrium” emphasizes that things tend to stay the same, except when they don’t. Change comes in spurts.

How things change gives scientists and thinkers their best clues about how things are. Our fixation on slow steady change has led to flawed assumptions in psychology, sociology, cosmology, ontology, and many more -ologies.

Include anthropology, which in this case is us. Must we endure imperceptively small steps of improvement forever? Can we hope instead to change all at once? Yes, if we allow it, and if the necessary conditions for change are present.

We’ve seen this week how something like the Olympic Trials can change how others see us, and also how we see ourselves. Our civic leaders tell us the Olympic Trials will be hosted in Eugene again in 2012 “and every four years after that.” But the athletes around us would insist we aim higher, dream bigger, accept no limits.

Eugene should bid to host the Summer Olympics in 2020. Not the Olympic Trials. The Olympic Games. The big enchilada. The full meal deal. The whole shooting match.

The smallest city to host a modern Summer Olympics was Antwerp, Belgium in 1920. That city’s population was approximately 300,000 at the time, which is a good guess for how many people will be living in Eugene and Springfield a dozen years from now. Every other Summer Olympic host city in the past century has been much larger than Antwerp, but so what?

Big cities offer established infrastructure and name recognition. They have experience hosting massive events. But they also have crime, smog, traffic, and lots of other things that are not attractors for athletes and fans. If the International Olympic Committee stopped for a moment to think about crossing the bar face-up instead of face-down, they could see a future that’s very different from the past.

Instead of choosing from a handful of world-class cities every four years, they could use their event to shape future cities.

Athletes and fans would get a small city’s undivided attention. The infrastructure built to accommodate the Games would produce a lasting impact on the built environment, and a lasting impression on the city’s residents.

Phil Knight will be 82 in 2020, and he’ll be ready to think about his legacy on a global scale. Vin Lananna will be ready to be Eugene’s mayor or the University of Oregon’s 17th president, whichever he chooses. Oregon will be ready to accept visitors from around the world. And Eugene will be ready for its growth spurt.

Higher. Bigger. Without limits.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) is a past president of the City Club of Eugene, an adjunct instructor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism & Communication, and the executive director for the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He blogs.

Hang the Olympic Trials. Eugene should begin the work now to bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics. We won’t really get our act together here until we know there are visitors coming, so why not shoot for the whole meal deal? Phil Knight will be in his mid-80s by then and Nike will be a world power afforded what most nations receive, and Eugene is the place he most calls home.